II
Three ethnic strains have combined to produce the Brazilian of today: (1) the Portuguese, (2) the native Indian, (3) the African Negro, who was brought in as a slave by the Portuguese.
The native element, known as the Brazilian-Guarany, at the time of the discovery knew no metals; they possessed a rudimentary knowledge of weaving, and some of them practised ceramics; their instruments were of polished stone, and their fishing and hunting implements were of the most primitive. The form of organization was rough. “Some spoke a rich language of delicate accents and varied expression; they had traditional customs and were skilful in the arts of war and peace; others, however, were coarse, deficient in culture, roaming in nomadic bands along the coast or amidst the high sertões. Some respected certain rules of morality and religion, in which, for example, the family ties were sacred.…”[9] Others dwelt in a certain “embryonic socialism” which permitted free love and the participation of woman in masculine pursuits. Ethnologists are not agreed upon the religious status of the tribes, hovering between the hypotheses of polytheism and anthropomorphic animism; the latter is more likely.
The Portuguese came at the height of their national glory. The sixteenth century, famed among them for its physical prowess, is also the epoch of Camões, Sá de Miranda, Bernardim Ribeiro and Gil Vicente. As to the Negro, his history in Brazil is much the same as that of the black slave in the United States, except that, owing to the proportions of interbreeding, the “color line” is less tightly drawn in the southern republic.
Two chief ethnic periods of formation have been distinguished in Brazil’s development, the first from the XVIth century to the end of the XVIIIth; the second, from the opening of the XIXth century to the present day. In the first period there was, chiefly, a crossing of the Portuguese with the Indian (mameluco), of the Portuguese with the Negro (mulato) and of the Indian with the Negro (cafuso). Later interbreeding becomes more complex, owing to the influx of new immigrants from Europe (Italians and Germans in particular, and Slavs in the south), and to the abolition of black slavery. So that the question has arisen whether the future of the land will be in the hands of the Luso-Brazilian or the Teuto-Italo-Brazilian. Brazilians naturally favour the former eventuality and in order to insure dominance by the Portuguese-Brazilian element propose new systems of colonization as well as immigration zones. Romero reached the conclusion that the Brazilian people did not constitute a race, but rather a fusion. As to whether this was a good or an evil he answered, in his “scientificist” way, that it was a fact, and that this should be sufficient. Since the Indian is fast disappearing and as traffic in blacks was abolished in 1851, and slavery in 1888, white predominance seems assured. “Every Brazilian,” said Romero, “is a mestee, if not in blood, in ideas.” So that white supremacy, never an unmixed blessing, does not, and cannot under the circumstances, imply an unmixed mentality.